Professor Cousins offered Maggie Mackenzie a Nuttall’s Minto. She ignored him and said, in an even more crotchety way than usual, ‘I’m lucky I’m not dead. They’re keeping me in for a day or two, I’m concussed apparently.’
‘I was concussed once,’ Professor Cousins said, but before he could embark on this familiar tale, a bell rang to signal the end of visiting-time — although for a moment Professor Cousins was under the impression that the hospital was on fire.
‘Well, goodbye,’ I said awkwardly to Maggie Mackenzie and, uncertain what was appropriate in the circumstances, I patted one of her washerwoman’s hands that lay atop the coverlet. Her skin felt like an amphibian’s.
As we made our way out through the overheated corridors of the DRI, Professor Cousins cast a nervous glance over his shoulder. ‘They’re trying to kill me, you know,’ he said conversationally.
‘Who?’ I asked, rather impatiently. ‘Who is it exactly that’s trying to kill you?’
‘The forces of darkness,’ he said conspiratorially.
‘The. .?’
‘Forces of darkness,’ he repeated. ‘They’re all around us and they’re trying to destroy us. We should get out of here,’ he added, ‘before they spot us.’
— No-one’s trying to kill him at all. He’s just paranoid, isn’t he? Nora says irritably. He’s just a red herring. And the old people — I bet they’re just paranoid as well.
‘Ah, yes, but that doesn’t mean that someone’s not out to get them.’
— You’ll never make a crime writer.
‘This isn’t a crime story. This is a comic novel.’
I abandoned Professor Cousins to the forces of darkness and made my way home, taking a mazy route through the back streets of Blackness until finally pitching up on the Perth Road. There was an ambulance on the street, blue lights flashing, and with a sense of alarm I realized it was parked outside Olivia’s flat. Olivia herself appeared — pale and unconscious and strapped on a stretcher, rather like Dr Dick before her. The same ambulanceman was there, as if there was only one crew in the whole city. When he caught sight of me this time he gave me a suspicious scowl of recognition. I suppose I did seem to be in attendance at rather a lot of mishaps.
A distraught Kevin appeared as if out of nowhere, along with all three of Olivia’s flatmates. ‘An overdose,’ one of them whispered to me.
‘I found her,’ Kevin said when he saw me. He was sweating uncomfortably and a wheeze like that of Mrs Macbeth’s old dog was coming from his chest. ‘I came to ask her if I could borrow her George Eliot essay,’ he said.
‘She did Charlotte Brontë,’ I said flatly.
‘She had an abortion yesterday,’ one of her flatmates said to me as we watched Olivia being loaded into the back of the ambulance. ‘It’s a shame, she loved babies.’
‘Loved?’ It was only then that I realized that Olivia wasn’t unconscious — Olivia was dead.
— No, no, no, no, no, Nora says, very agitated, you said this was a comic novel — you can’t kill people.
‘People are already dead.’
— Who?
‘Miss Anderson, poor Senga.’ (Not to mention most of Nora’s family, but I suppose it’s tactless to mention that.)
— They don’t count, we didn’t know them. Don’t kill Olivia. I shall stop listening to you, I shall leave, I shall . . .
She searches for the biggest threat she can think of. And finds it —
— I shall erase.
‘Oh, all right, calm down.’
Maggie Mackenzie was diagnosed with concussion and Professor Cousins went reluctantly with her in the ambulance. The ambulanceman who had ferried Dr Dick to hospital smiled at me and said, ‘You again.’
I elected not to go to the hospital, making the excuse that I had to redo my essay, and set off, taking a mazy route through the back streets of Blackness until finally pitching up on the Perth Road, where I bumped into Miranda, substantially the worse for wear but a medic nonetheless, and I grabbed hold of her limp form and hung onto it while I repeatedly rang the bell on Olivia’s front door.
After an agony of waiting the heavy door swung open and I dashed — as well as one can dash when hampered by a raging fever and a recalcitrant girl — up the stairs to her flat. One of Olivia’s flatmates was in the process of letting Kevin in. He was stammering on about George Eliot as I barged into him, sending him flying into the flat.
‘Olivia!’ I gasped to one of her flatmates.
‘She’s in her room, what’s the—’
Olivia’s door was locked. I told Kevin this was a matter of life and death, Olivia’s to be more precise, and he responded as heroically as Thar-Vint might have done by throwing his soft body repeatedly against the solid door until it gave in to his chivalrous bulk and opened with a splitting of wood.
Olivia was lying on her bed. An empty bottle of tablets and the remains of a glass of whisky were tumbled on the carpet. Her eyes were half open and she whispered to me, ‘Is Proteus OK?’ — which proved, if proof were necessary, what a charitable and altruistic person Olivia was. He was in good hands, I reported, and quite well — a sentence which contained one truth and one lie, which is a good balance in my opinion.
I pushed Miranda forward and said sternly, ‘Right — do something.’
‘Like ring for an ambulance?’ she said vaguely.
‘I’ve done that,’ Kevin said, dropping to his knees by Olivia’s bedside. Olivia’s lovely lip started to tremble and she began to weep — because beautiful girls weep where ordinary ones merely cry and grow blotchy (although Terri had a tendency to howl) — and I put my arms around her and stroked her hair and then burst into tears myself (because that was more the kind of girl I was).
‘For God’s sake,’ Miranda said crankily, ‘get some black coffee and start walking her round the room.’
I didn’t go in this ambulance either. The ambulancemen, different ones thank goodness, said Olivia was going to have to have her stomach pumped but would be fine.
‘Can I go now?’ Miranda said, once we’d watched the ambulance drive away.
‘Please do,’ I said faintly. My throat was swollen and my skin felt as hot and dry as desert sand, even though I had cold gooseflesh. I walked off quickly although I was having terrible difficulty co-ordinating my arms and legs. My legs felt weightless, as if I was on the moon, and I was worried that they might just float away. Other parts of me — my hands and my head most noticeably — felt as if they were being subjected to tremendous G-forces. Perhaps I should have consulted Miranda after all and explained to her that I was in the grip of the fading, falling disease.
I walked through town, not going anywhere in particular as long as it wasn’t home. I walked down Seagate, thought about going to the cinema but didn’t. The sickly smell of whisky drifted from a bonded warehouse and made me feel sick to my stomach. I carried on, down Candle Lane to Marketgait, across Marketgait to the Victoria Dock, where the ancient frigate Unicorn had found her final berth. Further off, a huge Scandinavian freighter was unloading wood and the smell of pine was carried through the foggy air. The water in the dock was brown and filmy and did not smell good, but I threw in a silver coin and wished for happiness and stepped back from the edge because the pull of water is a powerful thing and I expect many people have accidentally drowned on account of it.
Someone was standing next to me, a shadow on my vision, and laid a claw of a hand on my arm. I recoiled from the touch. It was the water-baby. The bad girl. The woman who is not the sister of the woman who is not my mother. (Not surprisingly) I didn’t have a full understanding of these tangled family ties and I asked her, rather tentatively in case the answer was in the affirmative, ‘You ’re not my mother, are you?’